The stray began to advance slowly into the room, legs stiff with caution, tail drooping, eyes wide and black, lips peeled back to reveal a full complement of teeth. About such concepts as absurdity it knew nothing.
The former Prince, with whom the eight-year-old Catherine Sutlin had once romped joyfully (at least until she’d gotten a Cabbage Patch doll named Marnie for her birthday and temporarily lost some of her interest), was part Lab and part collie… a mixed breed, but a long way from being a mongrel. When Sutlin had turned it out on Bay Lane at the end of August, it had weighed eighty pounds and its coat had been glossy and sleek with health, a not unattractive mixture of brown and black (with a distinctive white collie bib on the chest and undersnout). It now weighed a bare forty pounds, and a hand passed down its side would have felt each straining rib, not to mention the rapid, feverish beat of its heart. Its coat was dull and bedraggled and full of burdocks. A half-healed pink scar, souvenir of a panicky scramble under a barbed wire fence, zigzagged down one haunch, and a few porcupine quills stuck out of its muzzle like crooked whiskers. It had found the porker lying dead under a log about ten days ago, but had given up on it after the first noseful of quills. It had been hungry but not yet desperate.
Now it was both. Its last meal had been a few maggoty scraps nosed out of a discarded garbage bag in a ditch running beside Route 117, and that had been two days ago. The dog which had quickly learned to bring Catherine Sutlin a red rubber ball when she rolled it across the living-room floor or into the hall was now quite literally starving on its feet.
Yes, but here-right here, on the floor, within sight!-were pounds and pounds of fresh meat, and fat, and bones filled with sweet marrow. It was like a gift from the God of Strays.
The onetime darling of Catherine Sutlin continued to advance on the corpse of Gerald Burlingame.
CHAPTER EIGHT
This isn’t going to happen, Jessie told herself. No way it can, so justrelax.
She went on telling herself this right up to the moment when the upper half of the stray’s body was cut off from her view by the left side of the bed. Its tail began to wag harder than ever, and then there was a sound she recognized-the sound of a dog drinking from a puddle on a hot summer day. Except it wasn’t quite like that. This sound was rougher, somehow, not so much the sound of lapping as of licking. Jessie stared at the rapidly wagging tail, and her mind suddenly showed her what was hidden from her eyes by the angle of the bed. This homeless stray with its burdock-tangled fur and its weary, wary eyes was licking the blood out of her husband’s thinning hair.
“NO!” She lifted her buttocks off the bed and swung her legs around to the left. “GET AWAY FROM HIM! JUST GET AWAY!” She kicked out, and one of her heels brushed across the raised knobs of the dog’s spine.
It pulled back instantly and raised its muzzle, its eyes so wide they showed delicate rings of white. Its teeth parted, and in the fading afternoon light the cobweb-thin strands of saliva stretched between its upper and lower incisors looked like threads of spun gold. It lunged forward at her bare foot. Jessie yanked it back with a scream, feeling the hot mist of the dog’s breath on her skin but saving her toes. She curled her legs under her again without being aware that she was doing it, without hearing the cries of outrage from the muscles in her overstrained shoulders, without feeling her joints roll reluctantly in their bony beds.
The dog looked at her a moment longer, continuing to snarl, threatening her with its eyes. Let’s have an understanding, lady, the eyes said. You do your thing and I’ll do mine. That’s the understanding.Sound okay to you? It better, because if you get in my way, I’m going tofuck you up. Besides, he’s dead-you know it as well as I do, and why should he go to waste when I’m starving? You’d do the same, I doubt ifyou see that now, but I believe you may come around to my way of thinkingon the subject, and sooner than you think.
“GET OUT!” she screamed. Now she sat on her heels with her arms stretched out to either side, looking more like Fay Wray on the sacrificial jungle altar than ever. Her posture-head up, breasts thrust outward, shoulders thrown so far back they were white with strain at their furthest points, deep triangular hollows of shadow at the base of her neck-was that of an exceptionally hot pin-up in a girlie magazine. The obligatory pout of sultry invitation was missing, however; the expression on her face was that of a woman who stands very near the borderline between the country of the sane and that of the mad. “GET OUT OF HERE!”
The dog continued to took up at her and snarl for a few moments. Then, when it had apparently assured itself that the kick wouldn’t be repeated, it dismissed her and lowered its head again. There was no lapping or licking this time. Jessie heard a loud smacking sound instead. It reminded her of the enthusiastic kisses her brother Will used to place on Gramma Joan’s cheek when they went to visit.
The growling continued for a few seconds, but it was now oddly muffled, as if someone had slipped a pillowcase over the stray’s head. From her new sitting position, with her hair almost brushing the bottom of the shelf over her head, Jessie could see one of Gerald’s plump feet as well as his right arm and hand. The foot was shaking back and forth, as if Gerald were bopping a little to some jivey piece of music-'One More Summer” by the Rainmakers, for instance.
She could see the dog better from her new vantage point; its body was now visible all the way up to the place where its neck started. She would have been able to see its head, too, if it had been up. It wasn’t, though. The stray’s head was down, and its rear legs were stiffly braced. Suddenly there was a thick ripping sound-a snotty sound, like someone with a bad cold trying to clear his throat. She moaned.
“Stop… oh please, can’t you stop?”
The dog paid no attention. Once it had sat up and begged for table scraps, its eyes appearing to laugh, its mouth appearing to grin, but those days, like its former name, were long gone and hard to find. This was now, and things were what they were. Survival was not a matter for politeness or apology. It hadn’t eaten for two days, there was food here, and although there was also a master here who didn’t want it to take the food (the days when there had been masters who laughed and patted its head and called it GOOD DOG and gave it scraps for doing its small repertoire of tricks were all gone), this master’s feet were small and soft instead of hard and hurtful, and its voice said it was powerless.
The former Prince’s growls changed to muffled pants of effort, and as Jessie watched, the rest of Gerald’s body began to bop along with his foot, first just jiving back and forth and then actually starting to slide, as if he had gotten all the way into the groove, dead or not.
Get down, Disco Gerald! Jessie thought wildly. Never mind theChicken or the Shag-do the Dog!
The stray couldn’t have moved him if the rug had still been down, but Jessie had made arrangements to have the floor waxed the week after Labor Day. Bill Dunn, their caretaker, had let the men from Skip’s Floors “n” More in and they had done a hell of a job. They had wanted the missus to fully appreciate their work the next time she happened to stop down, so they had left the bedroom rug rolled up in the entry closet, and once the stray got Disco Gerald moving on the glossy floor, he moved almost as easily as John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. The only real problem the dog had was keeping its own traction. Its long, dirty claws helped in this regard, digging in and inscribing short, jagged marks into the glossy wax as it backed up with its teeth buried to the gumlines in Gerald’s flabby upper arm.